Michigan Won. Will Anyone Remember Who?

Michigan is national champions.

First title since 1989. A 69-63 win over UConn. Elliot Cadeau leading the way with 19 points. NCAA The confetti fell. The nets got cut. Ann Arbor went crazy.

And I watched it all thinking — will anyone remember these guys in twenty years?

I’m not trying to be a buzzkill. I’m genuinely asking.

Because here’s what I know. Ask any college basketball fan over the age of 35 to name five players from the 1992 Michigan Wolverines and they’ll rattle them off without blinking.

Jalen Rose. Chris Webber. Juwan Howard. Ray Jackson. Jimmy King.

The Fab Five.

They didn’t win a national championship. They lost in the finals — twice. And yet thirty years later, everybody still knows their names. Everybody remembers where they were. Everybody has a story about watching those five freshmen in black shorts and bald heads change the game forever.

Why?

Because people had a relationship with them.

They watched them recruit. They watched them commit. They watched them grow up on the court together — same class, same city, same era. Jalen Rose was from Detroit. People in Michigan felt like they knew these kids. They followed them from high school gyms to the Crisler Arena to the Final Four. The connection wasn’t manufactured. It was real.

Now compare that to 2026.

I watched this Michigan team all March. Great team. Tougher than I expected. Dusty May did a masterful job. But how many of those players were at Michigan last year? How many of them will be there next year? How many of them chose Michigan because they genuinely bled maize and blue — and how many of them chose Michigan because the NIL deal was right and the portal opened at the right time?

I’m not blaming the players. They’re doing what the system tells them to do.

But the system has a memory problem.

When a kid transfers in for one year, drops 19 points in the championship game, and then hits the portal again — he never really belonged to you. You borrowed him. And borrowing doesn’t build legacy.

The Fab Five didn’t transfer in. They were recruited together, grew up together, failed together. Webber’s timeout still haunts Michigan fans because they cared about Webber. He was theirs. The pain was personal.

Can you say the same about this roster?

Be honest.

I was talking to a buddy of mine after the game. He was thrilled. Michigan fan his whole life. I asked him to name me the starting five without looking it up. He couldn’t. And this was the day after they won the national championship.

That’s not his fault. That’s the era.

In a world of one-and-done players, NIL money, and the transfer portal spinning like a revolving door, fans don’t have time to attach. They cheer for the jersey, not the name on the back. And when you only cheer for the jersey, the names fade.

Think about that for a second.

We’ve built a college sports machine that generates billions of dollars, and in doing so, we’ve accidentally destroyed the very thing that made college sports special — the continuity. The belonging. The feeling that this kid from your state decided to represent your school and you were going to ride or die with him for four years.

That’s gone now.

I’m not naive. I know the old system wasn’t perfect either. Schools made billions while players scraped by. That wasn’t right. NIL corrected something real.

But there’s a cost. And the cost is connection.

You can’t build a legend in twelve months.

The Fab Five had three years together before it unraveled. Three years of games, press conferences, trash talk, bad losses, big moments. Three years for fans to fall in love with them. Even the ones who didn’t win a title — especially the ones who didn’t win a title — left a mark that lasts decades.

Michigan just won it all. And I’d bet you a large coffee that in fifteen years, most casual fans won’t be able to tell you who was on this team.

Not because they weren’t talented. They were.

But because the culture we’ve built around college basketball doesn’t let you stick around long enough to matter.

You win the championship. You get in the portal. You sign a new deal somewhere else.

And the story ends before it ever really starts.